“China is not our adversary,” Stoltenberg said, “but we must be clear eyed about the serious challenges it represents.”
NATO has for the first time singled out China as one of its strategic priorities for the next decade, warning about its growing military ambitions, confrontational rhetoric toward Taiwan and other neighbors, and increasingly close ties to Russia, AP reports.
While Russia’s war against Ukraine has dominated discussions at the NATO summit, China earned a place Wednesday among the Western alliance’s most worrying security concerns.
“China is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbors, threatening Taiwan … monitoring and controlling its own citizens through advanced technology, and spreading Russian lies and disinformation,” Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after presenting NATO’s ten-year Strategic Concept.
“China is not our adversary,” Stoltenberg said, “but we must be clear eyed about the serious challenges it represents.”
The strategic document directed its harshest language at Russia, but the mere mention of China was significant; the 2010 document did not discuss China. The official turn by NATO puts the world’s largest military alliance based on the United States armed forces on guard against a country with the world’s second-largest economy and rapidly growing military, both in numbers and in top-notch technology.
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